Fixing the VisualState of your Win8 AppBar ToggleButton

This post would also be called Fixing the AppBarButtonStyle for ToggleButton support in you Win8 app: Part 2

In my last post I explained how to fix the AppBarButtonStyle to support ToggleButtons. This minor fix does give you the correct style, however there are more problems. I’m not sure if it is a problem with the style, or with the ToggleButton, but after checking and unchecking the button, the state becomes completely messed up.

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Telerik Pie Chart: Taking Control of the Label

It is pretty straight-forward to create a pie chart with a simple label that identifies the “category” for each slice.  What is a bit trickier is to modify that label so that it shows not only the category, but the percentage each slice represents.

Let’s build the pie chart both ways to see the difference.

In either case, we begin with data.  Our pie chart will reflect a municipal budget, and so our first class is BudgetData.

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Preventing unauthorized modifications of XAML files in Windows 8 apps with XamlIntegRT

An approach for XAML files protection is implemented in XAMLIntegRT library. It is based on comparison of hash codes generated design-time for XAML pages with hashes calculated for pages installed on the target system. XAMLIntegRT includes two components – command line hash code generator and C# library for run-time validation.

XAMLIntegRT Library @ GitHub
XamlIntegRTGen.exe from GitHub
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Automating the testing of Windows 8 apps

In the blog post for testing Windows Store apps, we’ve primarily covered what to test your apps for. While you can manually execute the verification areas we’ve discussed in the previous post, it is more efficient to automate some of these verification areas. Automating the verification of your app has many benefits. Automated testing saves time and money that you’d otherwise spend doing manual testing. Once created, automated tests can be run over and over again at minimal cost and are much faster than manual tests. This helps ensure that the quality of your app stays high and the cost stays low with every new release of the app. Automated testing also improves the accuracy of the verification because even the most conscientious tester might make mistakes during tedious manual testing.

In this post, we provide some tips and techniques on automating the testing of Windows 8 apps. Keep in mind that automated testing is a powerful technique and it requires some initial investment to reap the full rewards. The advice and examples in this post are meant to get you started, but you’ll need to build and maintain your own infrastructure on top of them. If you are looking for some lighter weight testing techniques, check out the recent blog on testing apps with Visual Studio.

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Windows 8 Apps With HTML5

If you're an experienced Web developer, you'll love the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 options provided by Visual Studio 2012. Here's a step-by-step guide to getting started.

We now know that Windows 8 is coming on Oct. 26. That presents developers with a decision to make for building new Metro-style applications: HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, or XAML with C#, or Visual Basic with C++?

Many Web developers will choose HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 because they already have experience with it. Once that decision's made, the next step is to understand Windows Runtime (WinRT) and how its new APIs interact with Windows 8. [As this issue went to press, Microsoft was considering changing the name "Metro" to something else, but hadn't yet decided on the new name. We're leaving it as "Metro" until a new name is officially chosen. -- Ed.]

This article takes you through the process of building your first HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 Metro application. Let's get started.

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